redditors Help Unite a Family – A Special Mother’s Day Follow-Up

A couple weeks ago redditor Wannamaker posted that he was Finally going to try and call his birth mother after 21 years. He posted a few of the details that he knew about his birth mother, and asked if anyone knew her. He was mainly posting his story to get “a word of encouragement or at least a funny joke or two,” but redditors being the caring internet detectives they are went one step further. redditor -___- quickly found a lead which turned out to be wannamaker’s birth mother. Wannamaker talked to his mother, and they will be meeting in person this summer (reddit t-shirts will be there). Since this story was tops on reddit and so many people were following it, we caught up with wannamaker and asked him a few questions. Make sure you read his special comment to the reddit community at the end – It’ll make you feel good.

Q: When did you first discover reddit?
A: About two years ago, I started on Digg, and then a good friend of mine had left reddit up and I clicked through it for a while. I then made my internet boredom include both digg and reddit, yet slowly but surely phased digg out all together.

Q: What inspired you to start looking for your birth mom? had you searched previously?
A: two years ago my sister became inflicted with this unknown blood disease that required to get transfusions every week. I had always wanted to find my birth parents but had never started going through the documents to start my search. My parents began searching for my sisters birth parents records to see if they could ask some medical history questions to try and diagnose her disease. In the process they found records of my mother that they shared with me. I hired a PI to help try and locate her for me, which is how I got the basic information that I gave to reddit.

Q: Why did you ask reddit for help searching? did you expect to hear anything back?
A: I didn’t expect to ask reddit at all. I had two phone numbers that the private investigator had given me, as well as her name with her new last name from a marriage. I figured that I could get a word of encouragement or at least a funny joke or two from putting up a post telling reddit that I was going to finally call these numbers i had for years and to wish me luck. I was reading through the comments and about to call the numbers.. getting a lot of just call her already statements, I finally called. Both of the numbers were disconnected. I was pretty upset about it, just because i had built up having this awkward phone convo, and so I posted a single comment asking if anyone wanted to help me find her. 10 minutes later i get a link sent took me to PIPL.com, and I found two different facebook profiles for a Shelly Lowry in CA. and i had not expected reddit to find them. I sent out two messages to these random women asking if either of them had put a child up for adoption in 1988 and about an hour later saw a 1 next to my inbox messages . I opened up the message and the first thing i saw was Yes, I did, and he had your exact same birthday. I didn’t even open up the message at first I just went and had a cigarette to try and get my heart to start back. Needless to say i was overly excited and then added her as a friend and then talked to her on facebook chat for hours just asking her questions and telling her about my life. That’s pretty much it.

Q: How does it feel to have all this happen in a public forum?
A: Well the fact that this was out for the entire interwebs to see could have gone either way in terms of how I felt about it. I absolutlely never in my life expected that post to get to number 1 and stay there for so long, and have so much input on it from so many people. And im sure that if the tone of responses was more critical or mocking or what.. I guess more 4channy… I would have been a little less happy about it. But it wasn’t that at all, almost everybody was just pooping rainbows of happy kittens all over the post, and it seemed to make a lot of people smile. Now as for all this personal information being out there, I couldn’t care less. there isn’t anything too personal about my self I wouldnt want everyone knowing about.

Q: Any questions for reddit?
A: As for questions for reddit.. When are you going to do that great idea someone had a long time ago about having directional lines to discern comment thread distinctions. Instead of having to just judge its indention on the page. That’s the only question. Though I would like to comment to reddit, you should not only view yourself as a website for fun, or entertainment, or as a warrior against productivity and boredom, but you should be fucking proud to be here. You should be proud of the users you attract, and you should be proud of the way you run your orginization. You do a great job. And as I’ve said thousands of times now, thank you, thank you so fucking much.

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We are proud that the reddit community had a part to play in making this meeting possible and we wish them many smiles and roffles for their reunion.